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Mary Tyler Moore: The Actress Who Rethought Gender in the Workplace

To understand the complex dynamics of gender and equality in the workplace, you could read academic treatises, review statistics, absorb a million think pieces in a million magazines.

Or you could watch the 49th episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

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In The Good-Time News, which first aired in September 1972, Mary Richards—the only female associate producer in a Minneapolis TV newsroom—discovers that her male predecessor made $50 more per week than she is paid. Incensed, Mary storms into the office of her boss, Lou Grant, but suddenly loses her nerve. She fumbles through her complaint, finally spits it out, and finds Grant genuinely flummoxed by her anger. Why was this guy paid better than she? “Because he was a man,” Grant says, matter-of-factly.

Some women’s rights advocates have complained that Mary Richards, the working woman Moore played for seven influential seasons on CBS, was too passive and congenial to be a true feminist icon. But it was those contours of her personality—the authentic sense that she was grasping for the best way to assert herself in a man’s world—that made these scenes so meaningful. It’s easy to craft righteous speeches in your head or, these days, to pour out earnest, abstract diatribes on Twitter. It’s harder to navigate real-world relationships, to assert yourself in the thicket of power, hierarchy and respect. So it is in The Good-Time News: Grant’s sexism isn’t hostile so much as perfunctory. (“He had a family to support. You don’t,” is his further explanation of the pay disparity.) Richards truly likes him—and loves her job. Later in the episode, she is not afraid to contradict Grant in front of his boss. And in the end, out of respect, he gives her the raise.

This was the stealth power of Moore herself: an agenda of progress and awareness encased in comic talent, a self-deprecating persona, a lovable stammer, an enormous smile. Moore, who died in January at 80, got her show business start as a dancer, and her star-making role was as a sitcom wife on The Dick Van Dyke Show. She went on to play Richards in The Mary Tyler Moore Show—the role that cemented her importance in American culture—won an Oscar nomination for a dramatic turn in the 1980 film Ordinary People, and became a vocal advocate for animal rights and juvenile diabetes research. She had a son whom she lost to tragedy—an accidental gunshot wound when he was 24—and three marriages, the last of which lasted 33 years. Along with her second husband, TV executive Grant Tinker, Moore started a production company, MTM Enterprises. The company’s cheeky logo parodied Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s, with a kitten instead of a lion.

Moore used that kitten’s touch, a disarming relatability, as a vehicle for her own brand of feminism. On The Dick Van Dyke Show, she fought for her character, a 1960s house wife, to wear capri pants, instead of dresses, as she went about her daily life—and spurred a generation of women to re-think comfort and outward presentation. Playing Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Moore opened Americans’ minds about women’s ambitions, their relationships and their place in the workplace.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show was the first series produced by MTM Enterprises. She and Tinker backed the creators’ vision for a sitcom that would push the boundaries of the 1970s. (They had to compromise a bit: The network suits balked at the original notion that Richards would be divorced.) While the show feels in some ways like an artifact—a fashion time capsule, and a throwback to the days when a single working woman in her 30s was moderately scandalous—it’s also surprisingly relevant today. As 2017 made clear, we are still struggling mightily with standards of behavior and blurred boundaries between working and romantic life. On one end of the spectrum, half of the internet erupted last spring over Vice President Mike Pence’s policy, as a congressman, to never dine alone with a woman who wasn’t his wife. On the other end, this fall has brought a public reckoning over sexual harassment in workplaces across America, including stranger-than-fiction behavior in some of TV’s best-known newsrooms.

Mary Richards’ world, at fictional WJM-TV, occupied a place in the middle: No predators but plenty of bias, conscious and unconscious, and an overt acknowledgment that relationships still occupy the core of working life. Even by today’s comedy standards, this show was edgy, filled with references to sex, one-night stands, adultery and the pill. As a chronicle of the single woman’s experience at work and home, it feels true—partly because the producers deliberately hired women as writers, and partly because Moore and her supporting actresses could carry the storylines so believably.

Yes, there were some aspects of gender and work that the series didn’t touch. Richards’ single status offered plenty of comic possibilities, but it didn’t give her the modern dilemma of managing work and parenthood. And the overt harassment culture that Mad Men would later highlight—the power-driven torment of Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose—wasn’t a staple of WJM. It would have made for a dark and ugly show.

But even bathed in Moore’s comic lightness, The Mary Tyler Moore Show plumbed the pitfalls and challenges of sexual relations in ways that feel as fresh today as they were in the 1970s. Lou Dates Mary, the show’s penultimate episode, feels almost like the opposite of a sexual harassment story: Richards, 37 by now and fed up with the indignities of dating, realizes that the man she connects to best is Grant. She asks him out. They stumble nervously through the motions of a date. They kiss— in mutual consent—then start laughing uncontrollably, both realizing they’re better off as colleagues and close friends. It’s TV as reality and fantasy rolled into one.